Above the fold People spend most of their time on the first screen of a webpage — “the virtual equivalent of being above the fold” in a newspaper. So put your most important content where their eyes are. Image by Olu Eletu

“Above the fold” equals the first screen of a webpage — “the virtual equivalent of being above the fold” in a newspaper, says Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Communication + Technology.

And now that more than half of your visitors are coming to your webpage via their 3.5-x-6.5-inch smartphone screens, the fold matters more than ever.

So make sure your most important information shows up on the first screen of your webpage.

Location, location, location

Early studies showed that only 10% of web visitors scrolled, or looked below the first screen on a webpage. But that was back when we had 14.4K modems and had never seen a scrollbar before.

But now users do scroll, according to “king of usability” Jakob Nielsen. That’s probably because they’ve become more familiar with scrolling over the years.

Because that’s where their eyes are People look most often (red) at the upper left center of the first screen on a webpage, according to this aggregate heatmap shows 57,453 eyetracking fixations across a wide range of pages. They look less (yellow) on the rest of the first and the second screen of a page. They barely look at the white areas. Image by the Nielsen Norman Group

The 80/20 rule: The Nielsen Norman Group

NNG has observed “countless” users in qualitative studies who “stopped scrolling before finding the information they needed, or worse, didn’t realize that there was more information waiting for them below the fold,” Schade writes.

17x more attention at the top: ClickTale

Information near the top of the page gets 17 times more attention than the information near the bottom.

The most valuable real estate is near the top of the page, above the 800-pixel mark. (This was back in the day; don’t worry about the pixels so much as the trend.)

Visitor attention and page exposure peak at the 540-pixel line. Page exposure is the total amount of time visitors spend looking at an area of a page divided by the number of visitors who viewed that page. (Again, don’t get too hung up on the number as opposed to the trend.)

Visitor attention decreases exponentially as visitors scroll down a page. Visitor attention: the amount of time visitors spend looking at an area of a page divided by the number of visitors who viewed that area.

About 25% of the time, visitors don’t scroll at all.

ClickTale also found that:

About 75% of the time, web visitors do scroll to some extent.

About 25% of the time, visitors scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen.

Visitors also pay a lot of attention to the footer of the page.

And visitors scroll “relatively,” ClickTale learned.That is, in general, they scroll about halfway or three-quarters of the way through the webpage, regardless of the page size.

Most people scroll through an entire post made up of photos and videos.

About 66% of the time people spent on a page was below the fold. (Remember: Depending on the monitor size and story length, at least half and likely way more of web screens are below the fold.)

They’re just not that into you Many visitors don’t scroll at all; most visitors scroll about 60% through the page, and most visitors will scroll to the bottom — if your post is just photos or videos.

Schwartz also found that people tweet articles without reading them. Articles that got thoroughly read didn’t necessarily generate a lot of tweets. And articles that got retweeted a lot didn’t necessarily get thoroughly read.

Use the bottom of the page to help readers take the next step. You might include a call to action, links to related articles or a survey or poll, for instance.

“We don’t go to a page, see useless and irrelevant content, and scroll out of the blind hope that something useful may be hidden 5 screens down,” Schade writes. “What we find at the top of the page helps us decide to continue scrolling, navigate to another page, try another site, or abandon the task altogether.”

Draw readers further down the page.

And how do you tempt readers further down your webpage?

Jump ahead Jump links, like these on the EPA site, give visitors an outline of the page, show them what’s below the fold, and make it easy to get to the section they’re looking for.